While browsing the RS catalog the other evening (I lead an exciting life) I came across the WiPy 2.0. It is most certainly NOT the same sort of beast as a Raspberry Pi but it isn’t meant to be! It is even smaller and uses a lot less power but still has many of the same hardware interfaces (I2C, SPI, GPIO) as well as Bluetooth and Wireless.

Some of the boards also support SigFox, and LoRa which gives them a relatively long-range, low power wireless capability with a low data rate which seems ideal for data logging and monitoring real world events, but what really interested me was that these boards are programmable using Python and don’t have an operating system as such. When powered on they just execute what ever python script you have saved on the built-in flash drive. (Technically the Micro Python compiler runs on top of a multi tasking kernel – so if your application contains code that is time critical and contains code that must execute in a specific number of milliseconds this could be a problem).

My initial research suggests that I should be able to use most of the I2C stuff I built for My Raspberry Pi and it seems like it is more suited to a simple project such as an internet connected clock so can see I’m going to have to experiment a bit to see if I can drive an SAA1064 using one…